Author: Sam Machkovech

Happy Fourth from everyone at Ars! While the American half of the staff takes a much-need vacation over the next two days, we thought this would be a good time to share our personal picks for a very important piece of everyday tech: our headphones. Ars' staff is never lacking in opinions, and our preferences range from earbuds (to keep us tethered to our smartphones and subscription-music apps) to giant cans (because we want the right combination of sound and comfort while rocking out or getting our online-gaming frag on).

This isn't a scientific "best headphones of all time" list by any stretch. This is the gear we each use in our day-to-day lives, and we look forward to hearing your own picks as well. Without further ado: let's get canned!

KSC-32i FitClips, Koss: $14

Is it time to change that "III" into a "IV"? (credit: Blizzard)

Just because Blizzard finally got a wholly new franchise out the door this year doesn't mean the game maker isn't keen on milking its older franchises for everything they're worth. But one of those series, Diablo, has seen a bit of a content freeze since its 2014 expansion launched. While the company loves refreshing a game launch with expansion packs, Diablo III has been sitting idly. Now we might know why.

A brand-new "unannounced" entry in the Diablo world was, er, announced on Friday by way of an official job posting for—get this—the next entry's director. It's the game-news equivalent of New Line Cinema saying a new Lord of the Rings film is coming but, whoops, Peter Jackson's not involved, and they could really use a new person to get this thing up and running.

The post seeks someone to "lead the Diablo series into the future." While such a public push for a series director might read like an attempt to bring more diversity into the hiring pool, we'd frankly be shocked to see anybody other than the industry's old-guard vets fulfilling application requirements such as five years of game-directing experience and shipping "multiple AAA products as a game director or creative director." The job posting mentions nothing about virtual reality or other experimental hardware.

Virtual reality may be blowing up in tech circles, but mainstream pop culture has mostly kept an arm's-length distance from the movement. What's more, if you've seen a well-known celebrity in VR, that pretty much always means you've seen them in a 360-degree video—the kind that employs fixed video footage and therefore locks viewers into a single place as opposed to fully explorable virtual worlds.

Far-out musicians like Reggie Watts and Bjork have starred in 360-degree music-and-video experiments, while more mainstream artists like Jack White have published concert footage taken from a few 360-degree cameras. But if you're looking for a big musician who has launched anything resembling a fully VR experience, you surprisingly only have one option: Deadmau5, which launched a Google Cardboard-compatible VR app this week on iOS and Android.

Deadmau5 / Absolut

Deadmau5 in Absolut's new VR app, seen here VR-walking around a parking lot looking for his cat.

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The electronic music titan, aka Joel Zimmerman, lent his likeness, music, and input to Absolut Vodka to make a VR app. A skeptic might think this means a simple cash-in, but in an exclusive interview with Ars, Deadmau5 admitted he was pretty involved in its creation—because he's got serious VR dreams.

Reddit user and Guild Wars 2 fan galveyra2 breaks down exactly how a Beijing hockey team infringed upon a well-known video game's logo. (credit: galveyra2)

On Wednesday, news hit the wire that a video game's indistinguishable logo and art style had been lifted without permission, all done to advertise a wholly unrelated product. Sadly, the news brought on a real case of deja vu. As in: wait, didn't this just happen?

As it turns out, it had. Two very similar stories unfolded within 48 hours of each other, and they each speak to a pair of modern copyright issues: the ease with which images can be lifted and reappropriated by a lazy design firm, and how easy it is for such copycats to be busted by the court of public opinion.

The more recent case involved a professional hockey team from Beijing, which was announced last week as the newest team to join an upstart, highly budgeted Eurasian league known as the Kontinental Hockey League (KHL). Once the Kunlun Red Star revealed its logo, eagle-eyed hockey fans noticed that it was very nearly a beat-for-beat copy of the dragon head from MMO sensation Guild Wars 2. Eyes, nose, tongue, and general shape—it's very clearly a match, minus some weak width-stretching efforts by Kunlun's Photoshop intern. (Props to Guild Wars 2 fan galveyra2 for the specific image analysis posted above.)

(credit: Spencer E Holtaway)

Longtime Facebook users know better than to get comfy with how the site looks or works, as the service's decade of longevity has come in part due to constant refreshes—for better and for worse. The same might not be said for major news outlets who've grown to rely on Facebook as a source of traffic, and they may very well not care for the social network's latest site-tweak announcement.

In a Wednesday announcement, Facebook VP of Product Management Adam Mosseri declared that the site's algorithm would now shift towards "friends and family" content—a pledge that seems to appear every time Facebook talks about its algorithms. In today's case, however, Mosseri tucked the announcement's real meaning into a linked clarification: that all "pages" content would be pushed down in the general rankings. Meaning, if content is posted by a news outlet, a restaurant, or another establishment with its own "page" presence on Facebook, those posts will officially see "less of an impact."

Neither announcement touched upon "instant article" publication, a May 2015 initiative that saw multiple major news outlets—which all range from middle- to left-leaning—ally with Facebook to have stories directly publish on the social network as opposed to being hotlinked from their original sources. However, the announcement hinted at these kinds of stories possibly being deprioritized in the future. And the reasoning isn't hard to suss out: that whole conservative news-suppression mess from this May.

Playdead

News flash: You don't want to be busted by this spotlight.

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The era of the "puzzle-platformer" video game—in which players run through a 2D world with a weird gimmick or two to spice up the old Mario formula—has long passed. The late-'00s saw games like the time-bending Braid and the high-speed, tough-as-nails Super Meat Boy offer a breath of fresh, side-scrolling air, but those inventive gems were followed by a mess of games with much less heart.

One of the last greats in that era was Limbo, one of the best indies of 2010. That haunting, wordless game smeared its black-and-white world with a smoky blur and a preoccupation with death, and the results were visually and emotional staggering—but they had less impact in terms of gameplay. Its side-scrolling puzzles were occasionally clever, but they were there not so much to bend the player's mind as to spread out the pacing of the game's somber tale of a brother and a sister.

The Danish team at Playdead took its time crafting a follow-up game, and they could have spent those six years inventing a more innovative gameplay hook. But that's clearly not where their hearts are. Instead, these Danes have returned with Inside, a side-scrolling journey that once again doubles down on atmosphere over puzzles—and is all the better for it.

Heaven help us that we've reached this point: one where the legacy of a blatant B-movie retread like 1996's Independence Day can be looked upon fondly, especially in light of a sequel. I have no interest in holding the original film up to some American Film Institute-level standard; the campy Roland Emmerich original is a classic because it knew its place as a piece of hyperbolic, chest-thumping sci-fi fun.

But what happens when the original film's creator doesn't know how to make the "fun" happen anymore? Well, that's when you get Independence Day: Resurgence, the long-teased, finally-here sequel that suffers from the odd issue of hewing too closely to its predictable source material and yet not repeating a single good note. Abandon any hopes for the last film's cheesy-yet-inspiring President Bill Pullman. Don't get your hopes up for a comedically cocky fighter pilot or an abrasive and darkly funny super-nerd. And prepare yourself for such underwhelming action set pieces and phoned-in dialogue that you'll swear you've tuned into a high-budget porno film--or, at least, one that distinctly lacks anything in the way of sex. Or fun.

No two actors can replace Will Smith, apparently

Jeff Goldblum returns as David Levinson. Photo Credit: Claudette Barius.

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It's 2016 in America, and our country is kickin' it with a female President, a smattering of low-flying transportational and surveillance aircraft, a stronger international alliance with the world's greatest leaders (even Russia!), and a fully operational moon base. Life's pretty sweet these days, so long as you don't have a chip on your shoulder about your parents dying when a bunch of aliens messed your planet up in 1996 (which, conveniently enough, most of this film's heroes have in common).

The smartphone app Miitomo is but one aspect of the rapidly changing face of Nintendo. (credit: Nintendo)

As Nintendo gears up for its next console generation, the hardware and software guessers have focused on patent leaks and rumor mills, looking for any juicy hints and scraps as to the company's future. Maybe we'll get a crazy controller, a hybrid home/portable device, or a few retro-throwback features.

But if you want to understand the Nintendo of the future, the writing is already on the wall, and that wall is a very public one, revolving around social media and player interconnectivity. Nintendo is rapidly redefining its take on being a "family friendly" entertainment company, setting the table for a very weird Nintendo NX generation.

Forget the Wii's "blue ocean" strategy of winning over new players with gimmicks. Nintendo may very well be eyeing an even more intense way to capture new fans' minds and hearts with fully interconnected, online-focused products that will need constant tending by, and public responses from, a company that came to prominence in a much more conservative era.

Oculus has quietly dumped its unpopular checks for Oculus headsets, meaning HTC Vive owners can resume using the popular Revive hack without having to work around DRM. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

What a difference an Internet uproar can make.

The Oculus team has reversed course on one of its most unpopular decisions since launching the Rift VR headset in April: headset-specific DRM. After weeks of playing cat-and-mouse to block the "Revive" workaround that translated the VR calls of Oculus games to work smoothly and seamlessly inside of the rival HTC Vive, Oculus quietly updated its hardware-specific runtime on Friday and removed all traces of that controversial DRM.

What's more, Oculus didn't mention the change in its runtime update notes, which are curiously future-dated one day forward on Saturday, June 25. The news instead broke when Revive's head developer posted a note on the project's Github download page. "I've only just tested this and I'm still in disbelief," the unnamed LibreVR developer wrote. Accordingly, the Revive team has since removed the patch's DRM-disabling feature, which had later been implemented as an extreme measure to make Oculus games play on the HTC Vive.

We can only imagine the Steam Summer Sale's header image will be loaded with more characters and activity by the time the sale closes on July 4. (credit: Steam)

Ladies and gentlemen, start your game-buying wallets: The annual Steam Summer Sale has arrived.

The online game shop's bandwidth is currently being slammed thanks to the popularity of this sale, but should you be able to load its launch page, you'll see an advertised discount on a whopping 5,199 games until the sale ends on July 4. Thanks to the launch of VR headsets such as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, that makes this the first Steam Summer Sale to reduce prices on virtual reality games.

Not every major SteamVR game is getting a discount during this sale, but if you're considering throwing down hundreds of dollars on compatible hardware, you may appreciate saving a few bucks on such solid VR fare as the music-punching gem Audioshield, the stellar VR deathmatch game Hover Junkers, the must-own arcade shooter Space Pirate Trainer, the sword-and-shield quest game Vanishing Realms, the plane-management challenge of Final Approach, and the two-player puzzle fun of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. (That last one works fine without VR, as well, and we heartily recommend it.)